Brain Corp is an AI company creating transformative core technology for the robotics industry. Our purpose is to create autonomous technology that helps the real world work better. Brain's robotic and AI solutions help retailers ensure that the right product is on the right shelf at the right price, in a clean environment. Through the BrainOS® Robotics Platform, which powers the largest global fleet of the Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in operation in commercial public spaces, Brain Corp delivers insightful and efficient automated solutions in both commercial floor cleaning and inventory management, empowering organizations and their employees to achieve more. Brain Corp currently powers more than 40,000 AMRs, representing the largest fleet of its kind in the world. Brain Corp is funded by the SoftBank Vision Fund, Clearbridge, and Qualcomm Ventures.
This role is located in our Utrecht office.
Position Overview:
The Principal Software Engineer, Cloud serves as the senior-most technical leader for the entire Cloud Platform team, responsible for defining the architectural direction, technical strategy, and engineering standards across all cloud systems supporting our commercial robotics products. This leader will own the overarching technical vision for the platforms that power robot connectivity, fleet operations, remote management, customer-facing services, internal developer platforms, and large-scale data infrastructure.
In this role, you will help shape and scale the cloud infrastructure behind one of the world's largest commercial autonomous robotic fleets, delivering cutting-edge solutions that operate in real-world environments at significant scale. You will work at the forefront of robotics, distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and emerging technologies (including modern AI and GenAI-enabled development tools) to drive innovation, operational excellence, and competitive advantage.
This role requires deep technical expertise, strategic thinking, and broad organizational influence to ensure cloud investments align with product strategy, technological advancement, and long-term business growth. It offers the opportunity to solve highly complex challenges in robotics and cloud infrastructure while shaping the future of automation through industry-leading technology.
Essential Job Functions:
- Define and lead the long-term technical vision, strategy, and architectural roadmap for the entire Cloud Platform
- Serve as the primary technical authority across all cloud engineering domains, including fleet management, robot-cloud communication, data platforms, developer infrastructure, and customer systems
- Drive cross-team technical alignment, ensuring consistency in architecture, tooling, reliability, security, and operational practices
- Establish engineering standards, design principles, and platform governance processes across Cloud Platform
- Lead major architectural initiatives involving scalability, resilience, observability, security, and developer productivity
- Partner with engineering directors, product leadership, and executives to align technical strategy with business priorities
- Identify and proactively resolve systemic architectural challenges, technical debt, and organizational bottlenecks
- Guide the design and implementation of complex distributed systems supporting robotics products at global scale
- Champion and actively drive adoption of GenAI-based tools and workflows across the Cloud Platform organization, embedding them into engineering practices to improve developer productivity, system design, debugging, and operational efficiency
- Act as a hands-on technical leader in evolving how the organization builds software, including evaluating, standardizing, and scaling GenAI-assisted engineering practices
- Mentor engineers, acting as the technical leadership backbone of the organization
- Lead architecture reviews, technical planning, and critical design decisions across multiple teams
- Serve as the highest technical escalation point for complex platform, reliability, and production issues
- Champion security-first architecture and operational excellence across all cloud systems
- Evaluate emerging technologies and industry best practices to continuously evolve platform capabilities
- Drive a culture of technical excellence, innovation, accountability, and continuous learning throughout the organization
Education and/or Work Experience Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field
- 12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, cloud architecture, and large-scale distributed systems
- Proven success leading technical strategy across multiple cloud engineering teams or large organizations
- Significant experience architecting and operating enterprise-scale cloud platforms on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Prior experience in Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent high-level technical leadership role
Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities and Other Characteristics:
- Expert-level software engineering skills in Go and Python
- Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, and platform engineering at organizational scale
- Extensive knowledge of GCP services, including networking, storage, IAM, observability, security, and infrastructure automation
- Advanced experience with Kubernetes, Docker, container orchestration, and platform operations
- Strong expertise in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or similar technologies
- Proven ability to architect and scale highly available, secure, and resilient cloud systems
- Deep understanding of APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, and messaging technologies such as Pub/Sub or Kafka
- Strong Linux systems expertise, including networking, security, systems operations, and troubleshooting
- Exceptional strategic thinking and technical decision-making abilities
- Excellent leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across organizational boundaries
- Strong mentoring capabilities for senior engineers and technical leaders
- Demonstrated ability to build and lead teams using GenAI tooling and workflows, fostering a culture of GenAI adoption across the software development lifecycle (e.g., coding, debugging, testing, documentation) to improve engineering velocity, quality, and scalability while maintaining strong engineering rigor
Things that Make a Difference:
- Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related discipline
- Experience in robotics, IoT, autonomous systems, or large-scale edge-to-cloud ecosystems
- Experience leading cloud platforms supporting physical products or commercial robotics fleets
- Expertise in CI/CD systems, release engineering, and developer platform tooling
- Experience with Bazel build systems and large-scale build/test infrastructure optimization
- Familiarity with enterprise security, compliance, and regulated environments
- Experience building or leading platform organizations through periods of rapid scale
- Strong background in software lifecycle management, Agile methodologies, and engineering organizational design
Physical Demands:
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Essential functions may require maintaining the physical condition necessary for sitting, walking or standing for periods of time; operating a computer and keyboard; use of hands to finger and grasp; talk and hear at normal room levels; visual acuity to determine the accuracy, neatness, and thoroughness of the work assigned or to make general observations of facilities or structures; push or pull up to 20 pounds.
Work Environment:
The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. Employees are exposed to the typical office environment with computers, printers and telephones.
Benefits & Perks
In addition to base pay, our competitive total rewards package consists of:
- Hybrid Work Schedule: We operate on a hybrid model, with three days in the office (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday).
- Flexible Hours: We are not a traditional 9-5 company and offer flexibility. Please note that as our HQ is in San Diego, some coordination may occur outside of local business hours.
- Unlimited PTO: We offer an unlimited paid time off policy.
- Paid Lunch: Lunch is provided/paid for by the company.
- Holiday Observance: We recognize all national holidays.
- Office Environment & Location: We maintain an informal work environment, and our office is conveniently located directly on a major train station hub.
